Workshop in Copenhagen on becoming old in the age of mediatization

The seminar “Becoming old in an age of mediatization” held on the 31.10. - 01.11.2016 at the University of Copenhagen examined recent media dynamics in the lives of people in later life. The contributions at the seminar examined how these dynamics’ influence or change our perceptions of what it means to be(-come) old in todays mediatized societies. Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp opened the seminar with his keynote on “Mediageneration as a process”. The processual perspective he proposes allows us to understand media generation as the self-positioning of people in later lives that is based on shared experiences of certain phases of mediatization. The diverse presentations then examined how different aspects of mediatization become meaningful in the lives of elderly people from an empirical perspective. The presented cases addressed issues from a wide range of cultural and social contexts, such as health, education, politics and participation, dealing with media representations of age and ageing, the use and appropriation of media technologies by elderly as well as its design. Dr. Juliane Jarke and Ulrike Gerhard from ifib gave a presentation on “becoming old in the age of civil technology”, reflecting on the MobileAge project on the co-creation of online public services with and for people in later life. Given the recent developments in the digitalisation strategy of the Danish government, one core topic of the workshop turned out to be the mandatory digital communication between citizens and public sector in Denmark, that was critically examined in several presentations regarding its consequences for notions of citizenship and the exclusionary mechanisms and challenges that it entails particularly for people of age. The second day of the seminar was introduced by Kim Sawchuk, who in her keynote critically reflected on the concept of mediatization. Through her empirical work with collaborative knowledge- and research creation in the creative and playful engagement of ageing people with media technologies she showed up ways to challenge recent perceptions of ageing and mediatization